Danse/Performance

The buzzing sound of the dancers chanting those words became perceptible in the hallway leading to Place des Arts’ cinquième salle. Intrigued, I walked through the door to discover seven dancers scattered through the space, standing on a diagonally placed white Marley floor onto which shone a green neon light.

The stage felt bigger than what La cinquième salle has us used to. Despite that sense of largeness and feeling of void, the dancers felt strongly connected and close to each other. The scene was hypnotizing; we were brought into Furey’s cosmic world from the very first second. I rushed to find my seat in order to give my full attention to this play as quickly as possible.

The chanting kept on going. The dancers were slowly moving through space with very minimal movements, finding each other and tuning in to each other through the recital of their mantra. A mouth as big as the sky? Why? Maybe they needed it to feed off and ingest the full reality of this universe. It got me wanting a mouth as big the sky big in order to taste it with them.

The 70 minutes that made up Cosmic Love felt like a sort of group meditation between the dancers themselves but also between the dancers and the audience. The bright neon lighting and the buzzing soundscape filled the empty space and created a mystical atmosphere. The action happening on stage was very minimal, the few movements performed were repeated over and over and stretched over extremely long periods of time.

This pace of the action kept the audience in constant expectation, waiting to see what would happen next. This constant wait and expectation brought us, or at least me, into a state of hyper awareness that I had rarely been able to sustain for that long while watching a piece. When the last tableau took form, it was clear that the show was coming to an end, however it came as a surprise. I had completely lost sense of time and felt as if I were emerging from a sort of trance.

Sitting through this piece required a certain effort, the offering was far from simple entertainment, but the richness of living this connection with a play and its performers for a full hour was a resonant experience.